Evidence

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Julian’s 6th & 7th Showings

Julian had this vision, like her others, during the receipt of the Last Rites.
Living at the time of the Black Death, the worst century in recorded history, one of horror, fear and recrimination, she still found herself unable to see God as a wrathful avenger. Instead her writings are steeped in awareness of His boundless compassion.

Chapter 14 – the 6th Showing

The sixth Revelation is of the worshippfull thanke with which He rewardith His servants, and it hath three joyes. Fourteenth chapter.

After this our good Lord said,
I think and feel for you in your travail,
particularly in your youth.

In my mind I was raised into Heaven,
and saw Him as a lord in his own house,
who has called all his dear, worthy servants
and all his friends
to a solemn feast.

Then I did not see the Lord sit in His own house,
but saw Him royally reign there,
filling it with joy and mirth,
endlessly gladdening
and comforting His dear worthy friends
with full homeliness and full courtesy,
with a marvelous melody of endless love
in His own fair blessed manner,
which glorious hospitality of the godhead
fills the Heavens with joy and bliss.

God showed three degrees of bliss,
that every soul that willingly served Him
in any degree in earth,
shall have in Heaven.

First is the blessed feeling for our Lord
he shall receive when delivered of pain;
a feeling so high and worshipful
that he thinks it fills him,
as though there could be no more.
For I felt that all the pain and travail
that could be suffered by all living men
could not deserve the worshipful thanks
that one man shall have
that has willingly served God.

Second, that all the blessed creatures in Heaven
shall see that worshipful thanking,
for He makes his service known to all that are in Heaven.

And then this example was shown:
if a King thanks his servants,
it is a great worship to them;
and if he makes it known to all the realm,
his worship is greatly increased.

Third, as new and pleasant as it is received
so shall it truly last without end.

And I saw, homely and sweetly as this was shown,
the life of every man shall be known in Heaven,
and shall be rewarded for his willing service
and for his time.

And especially the life of those
that willingly, freely offer their youth to God,
is surpassingly rewarded and wonderfully thanked.

I saw whenever man or woman,
turn truly to God,
for that day’s service and endless intent,
they shall have all these three degrees of bliss.

And the more that the loving soul
sees this courtesy of God,
the likelier he is to serve Him
all the days of his life.

Chapter 15 – The 7th Revelation

The seventh Revelation is of oftentymes felyng of wele and wo etc.; and how it is expedient that man sumtymes be left withoute comfort, synne it not causeing. Fifteenth chapter.

And after this He showed a sovereign spiritual delight in my soul.

I was filled with a lasting sense,
security, mightily sustained,
with no painful dread.

This feeling was so glad, so spiritual,
that I was all at peace and at rest,
as though nothing in earth should grieve me.

This lasted but a while,
and I was turned and left to myself,
in heaviness and weariness of my life,
in irritation with myself,
that I hardly had patience to live.

There was no comfort nor ease to me,
but faith, hope, and love.
And of these I had in truth,
but little feeling.

Then soon again our blessed Lord
gave me again the comfort
and the rest in soul,
delight and security
so blissful and so mighty,
that no dread, no sorrow,
nor bodily pain that might be suffered,
should have discomforted me.

And then I felt the pain again,
and then the joy and the delight,
now that one, now the other, many times,
I suppose about twenty times.

And in the same time of joy
I might have said with Saint Paul,
nothing shall separate me from Christ’s love.
And in the pain I might have said with Peter,
Lord save me, I perish.

This vision was shown me to my mind
that it is useful to some souls to feel this
sometimes to be in comfort,
sometimes to fail,
and be left to themselves.

God wishes us to know
that He keeps us equally safe
in woe and well-being.
For profit of man’s soul,
he is sometimes left to himself,
though sin is not ever the cause.

For in this time I did not sin
so as to be left to myself,
for it was so sudden.
Nor deserved this blessed feeling.
Our Lord gives freely when He will,
and sometimes lets us be in woe,
and both is one love.

God wishes us this comfort
to cling to with all our might,
for bliss is lasting without end,
and pain is passing,
and shall be brought to nought
to them that shall be saved.

So it is not God’s will that we dwell
in the feeling of pain,
in sorrow and mourning,
but suddenly pass over to His keeping
in endless delight.

Julian’s eighth Revelation, follows at the end of June.

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The Resurrection

Many years ago I heard of a man who found his faith from reading the Book of Numbers – you might think this unlikely. So did I, until one day I was given an insight into what might have caused his epiphany.

Numbers is a bureaucrat’s delight: census results, rules, instructions and lists of squabbles, infringements and penalties. Plus a few slipped in joke-over-a-pint-extras like Balaam and his talking ass. But in all this it conveys a sense of individuals, families and groups doing the best they can and often getting it wrong. It lists who went where and who did what. There is something very ordinary about it, and a sense that they were, like me, making their own personal journey. Not always getting it right – not even Moses, Aaron and Miriam.

In a similar way I came to understand the resurrection through an account in which the event itself is hardly mentioned. Mark, who among other things was Peter’s interpreter in Rome, wrote an action packed account of Jesus’ ministry and execution about thirty years after it happened, but with very little about the resurrection.

According to Paul, Jesus’ resurrection and later appearances were witnessed by over 500 people. Quite a few were named. Most were still living when Mark wrote his gospel, and still living when John’s writings were put together at the close of the century. Long before John’s account the number of children, grand-children, friends and acquaintances of first-hand witnesses would have been in the thousands, assuming only moderate family sizes and sharing the news. Where are the ones saying, ‘ My grandfather/boss/mother etc. was there and it didn’t happen?’

There were some. Matthew’s account of the ascension says some doubted, but nevertheless the consensus confirming it was overwhelming. In spite of that, knowledge of Jesus’ earlier life and ministry would have been limited outside Palestine. Mark’s account, written in the mid-first century, was addressed to Christians in Rome who, however convinced they were by the resurrection, would have known little of what lead up to it.

Its opening words read like a title: The Beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Some manuscripts, including two of the most respected, end at the eighth verse of chapter sixteen with the empty tomb. This is usually regarded as its last verse. Others have marginal comments pointing out that earlier Greek copies ended there, and some indicate the extra text as spurious. Verses from other manuscripts with extra endings are included in most bibles. They read differently to the rest of Mark and seem to be later additions. In any event these extra endings, even the so-called ‘longer ending’, are very short.

It is unlikely the Gospel was let unfinished, or that an ending was lost before it was copied (the end of a scroll is harder to come adrift than that of a book). The author appears to have stopped here deliberately, feeling no need to add something already well known to his readers. The extra endings are almost certainly later additions, not by the author and not in his style, and do not fit with his stated intention in his title of presenting an account of the beginning.

People in Rome, like those in the Book of Numbers, were much like you and me but something, perhaps the large number of astonished eye-witnesses, convinced them. For me Mark’s Gospel, filling that desire for more background and yet needing no further evidence of the resurrection is strong evidence in itself.

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Genesis

You can talk of the Day of the Jackal.
You can talk of the Day of the Dead.
In Cromwell’s day, so it is said,
the days were black and the days ran red.

But the days that are as a thousand years,
and the thousand years as a day,
belong to Him who made the world
in six, plus one for play.

I have long wondered at the scientific accuracy of the biblical seven days as described in the first chapter of Genesis and the beginning of the second, and how few Christians think it has any accuracy at all, usually describing it as ‘truth dressed in story’. Its accuracy is particularly remarkable as it bears all the hallmarks of an oral tradition which predated writing. Even in the bronze age when it probably first found written form there was little scientific basis to draw on.

As in the poem above, biblical folk used day in the same varied way that we do. Peter, quoted in the second verse, gave an inspired explanation of this (2 Peter 3:8). I have interleaved the complementary biblical and scientific accounts below (or see children’s version, September 2016).

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless and void,
Space-time traces back to a chaotic void, in which possibilities, eventualites, shimmer in and out of being.
darkness covered the deep
an unstable, pregnant darkness.
and the spirit brooded over the waters.
The initial conditions had to be just right, in perfect balance…
God said, ‘Let there be light.’
… for electromagnetic waveforms to survive.
He separated the light from the darkness
Those first waves separated, producing others in the primaeval void.
***
God said, ‘Let there be an expanse…to separate waters from waters
The new waveforms burst in a vast expansion…
God called the expanse ‘sky’
… and space was created.
***
God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be drawn together…’
Waveforms condensed to particles, protons, neutrons, electrons…
… and let dry ground appear.’
… atoms condensed out of this ‘soup’ of particles, …
God called the dry ground land, … the waters he called seas.
… mass and gravity brought them together. Solids and liquids formed and eventually the Earth with its amazing landforms and sea-scapes.
Then God said, ‘let the land produce vegetation…
Primitive vegetal life began, probably in hot inland springs, and travelled to the seas.
***
God said, ‘Let there be lights in the sky to separate day from night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons, days and years…
The tidal forces of the sun and moon and stars drive and mark the seasons, days and years, which in turn drive evolution.
***
God said, ‘Let the water teem with living creatures…
Animal life, primitive at first, formed in the oceans…
… and let birds fly above the earth and across the expanse of the sky…
… then spread to land. Many early forms perished, including the dinosaurs, of which birds are probably the only descendants.
***
God said, ‘Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals each according to its kind…
After the great Permian extinction mammals proliferated and became the predominant large creatures on land…
God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, in our likeness…
…of which man, the latecomer, came with the ability to wonder at creation and to love it…
… and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over livestock over all the earth and the creatures that move on the ground.
… and with the immense responsibility this brought.
***
... on the seventh day God rested from all his labour…
… like the first it lasted less than a millisecond.

Then the real work began.

The events and order in this early creation account match modern science almost too accurately. Then there is the coincidence of waters and waves and the apparently contradictary concept of a formless or chaotic void, translations of the original which quantum physics now supports. Those with a statistical bent may work out the odds. But whether we can, whether we want or need to, we can still be amazed. We should still wonder.