At the end of this month I have a book coming out, Embodying Prayer. And as I have been reflecting on this important event in my life I have come to realise that I have always done stuff and made stuff to express my deepest feelings.
As a child I made stuff, cuddly toys, aprons, bits of craft projects – and mostly I gave them to my mum to tell her I loved her, that she was so, so important to me.
And of course, I am not unique. All of us give gifts – ‘stuff’ – sometimes shop bought and sometimes homemade – to build up our relationships, to say I value you, you matter to me, I love you.
In some ways, wrinkles aside, I haven’t changed much. I spent the spring months this year knotting prayer bracelets to give to year 6 children in Bollington where I serve as a curate – to tell THEM that they are loved – by my church, St Oswald’s, by God. I wanted them to know …..as they headed off to the scary adventure that is high school….that prayer is more than words. And when words fail or beliefs fail you can still pray ….you can light a candle, you can hold a prayer bracelet and remember that you are loved, valuable and that there is help out there. I wanted them to know that they matter – to God, to the world, to St Oswald’s, to me.
At the beginning of July, my little prayer table at home was COVERED in prayer bracelets – and I and folks in the Sunday congregation prayed with every single one of them. The children recieved ‘pre-prayed-with’ prayer bracelets!
Now, my prayer table is a bit emptier – except I now have cards on it with the names of those we gave the bracelets to – because we are still praying for them.
One of the things I love about the Christian faith is that it is INCARNATIONAL – God becoming a body – a person. God saying that stuff – the stuff we humans touch and the kind things we do – are sacred and eternal.
That’s why we light candles in church – to put our prayer into a simple action. And in the service called Holy Communion we eat a tiny bit of bread and drink a sip of wine – to connect us to the infinite, to the eternal, to remind us that we matter to the living God.
I still like making stuff. I knot prayer bracelets. I write books. I blog a bit. Stuff matters. As do you. God bless.
Walking with Julian – All Shall Be Well (This blog was recently published as an article in Transforming Ministry Magazinehttps://transformingministry.co.uk/)
Meeting Julian
It was the priest who conducted my wedding, some 37 years ago, who first quoted Julian of Norwich to me. “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well,” he said, to calm my pre-wedding nerves. I had never heard of Mother Julian before, the 14th century anchorite whose visions led her to write what we now know as the spiritual classic, Revelations of Divine Love. However that phrase was a doorway for me into her little cell that I have stepped through frequently over the years and still do today.
That phrase itself, perhaps her best known, was written by a woman living through the plague who may have suffered the deaths of her own children and had certainly suffered serious illness. She constantly ran the risk of being accused of heresy, both because of her sex and because of her radical theology. She was not, in some simplistic way, simply hoping for the best nor does this quote have much to do with the power of positive thinking. It is rather a marker of a deep trust in the kindness and what she calls the ‘friendliness’ and ‘courtesy’ of God. I used to text the phrase to my daughter when she was going through difficult times. It in no way diminishes the challenges of life but puts them into an ultimate perspective where everything that happens and all that exists is held, like the hazelnut of another famous passage, within the gentle and loving hands of God.
If a 14th century anchorite, living through the bubonic plague and the wars and violence and misogyny of that period, living in the midst of fear and death, could say that all will be well then I felt, and still feel, that her deep and radically optimistic theology was a resource to lean on.
A growing presence
Julian has also helped me, and countless other women too, to find some female aspect to the divine in a religion dominated by maleness. In the past 50 years, feminist theologians have raised awareness of the Bible as a document written largely, if not exclusively, for men and one that is full of sexism and misogyny in its portrayal of women. The most widely used metaphors for God – father, king, warrior, slave owner – in the Bible and in our liturgies and hymns, are not only male but patriarchal, assuming relationships of domination and violence.
And while the mostly male authorities of established churches acknowledge that God is beyond all gender and that the words we use for the divine are metaphors, this is often accompanied by a paradoxical instance that it is and will always be wrong to call God anything other than ‘Father’ or ‘Lord’.
The Church of England is just at the beginning of what I expect to be a very long conversation – indeed struggle – about the possibility of naming God as anything other than ‘Father’ and ‘Lord’ in our authorized texts. Sadly, I doubt I will see very much change in my lifetime.
And yet in the midst of that patriarchal context, dear Julian simply calls Jesus ‘our true mother’ and says that ‘the great power of the Trinity is our father and the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our mother’. And while scholars differ about whether Julian can actually be called feminist, she has certainly helped this woman to find her feminist voice.
As a feminist and an academic I felt – and feel – very outnumbered in the Church of England in my desire to name God as She, as well as He; in my belief that the Spirit is calling us, church and society, to move toward a diversity of ways of naming and imagining the Divine. At theological college recently I deeply shocked a dear colleague from a conservative theological background the first time I prayed aloud in the name of our Mother Jesus Christ! So it was a real comfort and, yes, joy to be able to gently share with him that I was NOT doing anything Julian hadn’t already done, many hundreds of years ago!
Female imagery for God is present both in the Bible and, as Julian reminds us, in our tradition but it has been largely overlooked. Some women decide that our established traditions are simply irredeemably patriarchal and walk away. As one of those who remain, as a woman for whom tradition, despite its failings, continues to have beauty and meaning and power, Julian is a great source of help and encouragement.
Lived experience
And Julian helps me find my feminist voice because she took her own female experience – and the female embodied experience more broadly – with the utmost seriousness at a time when only educated elite men were seen to be competent to teach or preach or to discuss theology. She uses the squalor and blood and dirt of the female domestic sphere to draw conclusions about the very nature of God. Claire Gilbert, whose novel I, Julian was published this year, (Byrne, 2023) notes how Julian’s frankness about experiences like constipation, helped her deal with her own drug induced constipation during cancer treatment. Julian’s is no squeamish, sanitized religion. She finds the presence of God in human soil and the soil of the earth and uses those experiences to show that God is not only kind but profoundly understanding, forgiving, nurturing and sustaining.
Julian is still cutting edge for feminist theologians in many ways. Having had her visions at a relatively young age, around thirty, she then spent the next 50 years mining those experiences for profound insights into the nature of God. Today, it is still normal for most theology to be written by elite white men and for their discussions of their experiences of God to be labelled theology while when women or lower status men write about their experiences they are labelled memoir or personalstory. Black women are leading the way in claiming the lived experiences of women as sources of theological reflection and others follow. Writers like Dolores Williams (Williams, 2013) and Eilidh Campbell (Campbell, 2021) build on the foundations laid by Julian of Norwich in giving to women like me the confidence to see ourselves as theologians too and to see the ordinary, messy but dignified struggles of real female life as windows into God.
As a teacher of the Alexander technique, an embodied movement-based contemplative discipline, I draw on Julian in my belief that learning more about our miraculous bodies and paying gentle, appreciative attention to the moment by moment sensations of simple movements, is both prayer and theological reflection. Such physical awareness teaches me and my students more about the Divine Reality that is expressed in and experienced only through our bodies.
A radical writer
In her introduction to the Penguin Classic Edition of Julian’s Revelations, (Spearing, 1998) Elizabeth Spearing makes the point that Julian wrote very much as a woman and this is part of why her work is so distinctive. Male writers had received classical educations based in Latin and rooted in competitive debate where there were winners and losers in argument – a kind of intellectual equivalent to medieval jousting where you learned a subject by fighting over it. This combative kind of writing is sometimes referred to as ‘agonistic’ and it is characteristic of both ancient classical cultures and our own academic traditions (Ong, 1974). This classical influence can be seen in the gospels, perhaps especially in John’s Gospel with its harsh denunciations of opposing views.
Julian, lacking a classical education, simply does not engage in that kind of argumentative writing and it is one of the most refreshing and for me, profoundly healing aspects of her writing. She does not argue for her views. She deeply and gently explores and presents her interpretations and leaves space for the reader to respond as she or he wishes to, as the Spirit moves us to. She is not interested in imposing her view as ‘the right one’ or in convincing her reader that any other view is therefore ‘wrong’. Today, feminist academics challenge the male conventions of combative academia and call for more relational, more creative ways of thinking, reading and writing.
Maggie Ross also notes that Julian uses subtle layers of meaning – Ross calls them ‘word knots’, where a single word can have multiple meanings and, crucially, ‘all meanings are meant’ (Ross, 2018, p. 22). Ross says this is one of the strategies Julian uses to do theology and it is a profoundly contemplative strategy. There is no grasping for a single meaning, a right interpretation or for control of how the reader responds. It is a widening of meaning, an apophatic opening of space for the reader/hearer and for the Spirit to work. Again, I see Julian as an ally and role model and both in my writing and in my preaching, my aim is always to leave space for other views, space for the Spirit to speak.
This contemplative mode of reading Scripture, has opened up for me difficult texts like John’s Gospel and indeed all scripture. There are always multiple readings present in any passage, many possible interpretations and, as Julian saw, ‘all meanings’ may be meant.
It has also provided me with a way to respond generously and with curiosity to other faith traditions, both Christian and beyond. So when I hear simplistic single meanings of Biblical texts used as weapons against vulnerable groups in society I find I turn to Julian and her word knots to wonder how else a text might be interpreted? She shows us, I think, a different and gently powerful way of reading and believing that does not need someone else to be ‘wrong’ so that I can be ‘right’.
Resting in God
One of Julian’s writings that I turn to most frequently is that on prayer. She says that ‘The best prayer is to rest in the goodness of God, knowing that that goodness can reach right down to our lowest depth of need’. I have experienced illness and disability in recent years and have at times struggled with low energy and exhaustion. That phrase constantly reminds me to stop trying so hard, stop trying to do prayer and just to rest, in stillness, in love, in the hands of our Divine Mother and Father and let go.
Julian presents us with a radical vision of God as female as well as male, a challenging willingness to take the reality of life – including women’s lives – as the stuff of theological reflection and a gently contemplative way of doing theology that moves beyond ‘right versus wrong’. Julian’s is a courteous, powerful, positive and above all kind vision of God that I think the world needs very much today.
Byrne, L., 2023. I Julian: The fictional autobiography by Claire Gilbert. Church Times , 6 4.
Campbell, E., 2021. Motherhood and Autism: An Embodied Theology of Motherhood and Disability. London: SCM Press .
Fox, M., 2020. Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic and Beyond. Bloomington: iUniverse.
Llewelyn, R., 1980. Enfolded in Love: Daily Readings with Julian of Norwich. Fourth Edition 2004 ed. London: Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd.
Ong, W. J., 1974. Agonistic Structures in Academia: Past to Present. Daedalus: American Higher Education: Toward an Uncertain Future , 103(4), pp. 229-238.
Ross, M., 2018. Silence: A User’s Guide Volume 2: Application. London: Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd .
Spearing, A., 1998. Introduction and Notes . In: Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love . s.l.:Penguin , pp. vii-xxxiii.
Williams, D. S., 2013. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-talk. New York : Orbis .
So, today is Candlemas! Traditionally its when candles where taken into church to be blessed. It occurs 40 days after Christmas, and is known in the church year as The Presentation of Christ in the Temple, when Mary took Jesus to the temple to be blessed.
Snowdrops are sometimes called Candlemas Bells as they tend to open about now. There is a legend about the snowdrop that says an angel took pity on Eve after she and Adam were banished and made a snowdrop bloom as a symbol of hope to cheer her up.
As with many Christian festivals there are echoes of pagan festivals underneath it. Candlemas falls on or around a cross-quarter day, midway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. So, the days are getting longer again!
Known as Imbolc (lambs’ milk) because the lambing season begins around now it was also called Brigantia for the Celtic female deity of light. In the Christian tradition we recall St Brigid on 1 February.
In some countries pancakes are eaten at Candlemas.
SOoooooo
Light candles
Make pancakes
Take photos of/draw/look closely at snowdrops. Find your hope for the coming year.
This can be a gloomy, decorations down, back to work/school in the dark time of year. But, celebrating is GOOD for us and the more we do, the better we feel.
So, why not, as you take down the tinsel and cards, celebrate Epiphany, which is when the Magi, (wise men – or women!) actually arrive in the Christmas story?
You could: Bake an Epiphany Cake – google it and you’ll find lots of recipes.
And/Or hold a little ceremony and Chalk the Door as a house/classroom blessing and an expression of hopefulness for the year ahead?
The custom of chalking the door is an old Epiphany custom, one that is still used and is growing in popularity again.
So, 20+C+M+B+24 – The 20 and the 24 refer to the date, the + to the Cross of Christ and the C M B EITHER represent the traditional names of the Magi, Caspar, Melchior, Balthazar OR Christus mansionem benedicat – Christ bless this house.
So, why not…..
Celebrate Ephiphany by reading the story of the Magi from Matthew’s Gospel, Chapter 2 and chalking your door or the door of a friend or relative. Teachers, you might process around your school and chalk every door you can find!
Here’s the reading…
“After Jesus’ birth, Wise Men from the east came to Jerusalem. They asked, “Where is the child has has been born to be king of the Jews?…..King Herod sent them to Bethlehem…The star they had seen when they were in the east went ahead of them. It finally stopped over the place where the child was….
The Wise Men went to the house. There they saw the child with his mother Mary. They bowed down and worshipped him. Then they opened their treasures. They gave him gold, incense and myrrh”
Then Chalk 20 + C+ M+B+24 (in any colour) and say, if you wish,
God is love. The infant Christ was born as God’s love on earth. Christ dwells within each loving person, each loving act.
May God dwell in us and in this house/classroom in 2024. May She/He bless us richly and may we be God’s blessing to others. Amen
And you might talk before or after about your hopes as a family/class for 2024 – personal or as a community.
And THEN eat more gold coins……….and cake!
With thanks to Mark Earey at the Queens Foundation, Birmingham, https://www.queens.ac.uk/ for this idea.
An Alexander Class for Parents and Carers (babies welcome)
Mondays 1.30 – 2.30 £10 per class or £45 for 7 weeks
Learning the principles of mindful movement – working WITH our bodies, not against them. Help yourself to easier movement and learn how to support your developing child as they grow.
Clinical trials show the Alexander Technique provides substantial long term relief from lower back pain. It is in the NICE guidelines for Parkinson’s disease to relieve symptoms, including depression and improve balance. It is relaxing, grounding, stress reducing….it can be life changing.
An excellent talk on movement and why the fitness industry gets it badly wrong from a fitness expert and male model, Roger Frampton. He highlights the ridiculous practice of Western cultures of taking master movers – also known as children – who squat naturally and with ease and then teaching them to SIT for 7 or 8 hours a day.
I suspect that this single practice, the practice of replacing the natural human positions of standing and squatting with sitting on that man made, modern and malign invention THE CHAIR probably contributes more to the epidemic of back pain in the Western world than anything else.
Sitting, slumped over, limits our breathing, contracts our spines, weakens our core muscles and probably much more. We used to squat – Frampton calls it the ‘pre-chair resting position’ – why were we made to stop???
Frampton says we should watch children to understand how our bodies want to move and try to get back our full range of movement – the movement we once had. He criticizes the outcome focus of the fitness industry – constantly measuring time, distance, repetitions, weight – and says we should focus instead on HOW we move – and focus on movement, not looks, not muscles. Work with your body, not against it, he says and prioritize the spine. You are, as a Chinese saying has it, as old as your spine.
So, the Alexander Technique – not about posture but about movement – put movement first, understand how your body wants to move, used to move – find an Alexander teacher or, perhaps better still, watch a small child.
On Saturday, 16 people turned up at St Peter’s Church, Macclesfield to explore the simple, yet complex movement of walking. We all know how to walk. What we don’t always know is how WE walk and how we might walk with more ease, more enjoyment. And that is what we explored together.
And it was immense fun – a really good workshop. And people learned a great deal. And we metaphorically covered a great deal of ground though we physically didn’t walk any great distances.
And looking back on any workshop or group session I COULD pat myself on the back, as the person running the workshop and say ‘well-done, I ran a good workshop’. Or, alternatively, ‘that didn’t work, I must not be a very good teacher’. And in these days of an education system that measures teachers on how well their students do, that is certainly a tendency. But that view, it seems to me, puts TOO much emphasis on the role of the teacher and not enough on the role of everyone else in the room.
It’s not that the teacher has NO role or responsibility. Of course they do. It was my job, yesterday, to ensure that the physical and emotional environment was as safe as possible – that people knew they weren’t going to be judged or criticized. I try to make sure the physical environment is as beautiful as possible too – that tells participants I value them. As does the fruit and treacle flap jack at break time. And it’s my job to be as skillful a teacher as I can be, to keep studying and learning myself and to teach as clearly as I know how. I am responsible for the pace of the workshop, the content of the workshop.
On this particular afternoon I was also lucky enough to have two other Alexander technique teachers to help me, the lovely Janey Goodearl and the wonderful Su Harrison.
But – and it is an important but – the other people in the room play an absolutely essential role in the success of any workshop. Their openness to learning, their generosity to one another, their courage in being willing to change and look at new ways of doing things are things the teacher or workshop leader can encourage but not actually give. Only the participants can do that.
So, as I look back on Saturday’s workshop and reflect on it, I have to pay tribute to the open-hearted, warm, friendly and open-minded participants for the learning that took place. To Janey and to Su, for their invaluable help and to all the lovely people who came together to form a community of learning the Alexander technique together.
If we learn, we change. And at the end of four hours, people had changed. They said,
‘I feel safe and more stable and more appreciative of the ground’
‘I learned how strong my lower body is’
‘when I went for a walk I thought more about the process of walking instead of being in my head’
‘I felt more grounded, more connected with the ground’
‘I felt a lot more stable, I looked up, I enjoyed going for a walk!’
‘I’m taking away a sense of freedom and stability’
‘I’m taking away the need to slow down’
‘I’m going to be a bit gentler with myself about change’
‘I learned that holding yourself rigid is a silly waste of effort’
Well done, those students of the Alexander work. And thank you for a good afternoon’s learning.
Sometimes, running Alexander Technique groups is the MOST enjoyable, satisfying and above all, funniest job I can imagine. And today was one of those days. There aren’t many groups of people where I can picture myself saying, ‘Let’s imagine we are a pelvis, and then paint ourselves a pelvic floor!’ but my Union Chapel Alexander groups are that kind of group so today we did precisely that.
First, though, we began with me deciding and admitting that I need to learn how to teach voice as an Alexander technique teacher and that I need my groups to teach me how to do it. There are singers in my groups and other voice users – that is, other humans! So why would I not use these experts to learn from?
We are language using animals. On the radio today I heard a paleo-linguist say that speech is finely controlled breathing. And the Alexander technique is, first and foremost, a breathing technique. So, with the help of Harriet Anderson’s excellent The Thinking Teacher’s Body we first thought about standing in a quiet, balanced way so that our musical instrument, i.e. our body, was as aligned and relaxed as possible. And while John, (thank you John) read aloud an extract from Harriet’s book I went round and used my hands to help people explore that quiet standing.
Then we did one of Harriet’s ‘Explorations’ and attempted to vocalize in a really good slump. And we explored how that sounded and how that felt. Linda said it felt like a large fat cat trying to squeeze through a small cat flap! And then we explored vocalizing while in a more balanced and open state – and the difference that made.
But it was after coffee that we became a pelvis! Martyn and Linda were the ischial tuberosities, Fiona the pubic synthesis. John was the sternum and spinal column, other group members were the iliac crests. And I painted in a pelvic floor.
When we could stop laughing enough to think about what we had done, we agreed that this was a funny, powerful way to explore our mental body maps – and to learn about and think about the extraordinary miracle that is the human body. So my thanks to one of MY teachers, Bruce Fertman for both the ideas and the confidence to try them out.
We did a LOT of voice work today – and I felt I learned a huge amount from my committed and generous students. And we all felt we had started to explore a way of studying the Alexander technique together – and breath and voice – that we can extend and develop in future sessions. And we laughed – a lot. And I LOVED the session. As always, I feel grateful and privileged to teach this work.
So, here’s to more pelvis building….. and to more tuning of the musical instrument that is the human body.
Jennifer Fox Eades: Alexander Technique Teacher 